[Fwd: Fedora & openSUSE meeting / cooperation ?]

[Christopher Blizzard]

Luis Villa wrote:
> Both of those are equally dreamy. The whole point of what opensuse is
> trying to do is make it so that people can do it once, distribute it
> over a large number of platforms. Having the maintainer of the package
> also be a co-maintainer in every distribution they want to distribute
> something through is insane, and just the kind of totally bullshit
> hoops that we must eliminate if we actually want linux to become a
> first-class platform.

Agreed.  Part of my underlying thinking of bundles is that they can 
represent the lowest common denominator for _desktop_ functionality. 
i.e. they support the gtk2 API/ABI, service activation via dbus, self 
describing mime files anything else they carry around themselves.  Also 
adding support to debian/suse/fedora desktop and then we can actually 
create a pretty portable package.  We need better build tools to make 
this happen, and I need to prove the idea out through OLPC, but it's a 
good start for a real roadmap to success.

> 
> [This is only true if your vision of the future of Linux includes
> multiple distros; if your vision is that there is only the One True
> Distro, then yes, having upstream also be co-maintainers in the One
> True Distro makes sense. This is basically Canonical's vision. In some
> ways it makes sense- we gain a lot of efficiencies by having One True
> Kernel which everyone else forks from; why not have One True Distro
> that everyone else forks from. Of course, putting it in the hands of a
> proprietary tool makes me get violent.]

I haven't been particular shy about the fact that I want Fedora to 
become that base.  But I've wanted to do it by moving us to an open 
model (core/extras merge) by providing superior tools (VCS discussions 
and the future of RPM) by improving our support for hardware, in 
particular laptops (smolt/LHCS) and doing so in an honest an open 
manner.  I will not coerce people into working with us.  It should just 
be the natural place to do so.

A lot of this is based around trust.  I still work at Red Hat and in 
Fedora because of all the companies that are out there who work in open 
source and free software, it's the one that has found its values and has 
stuck with them through and through.  And we've been doing it for years.

I just want to make sure that we take it to the next level.  What have 
we learned in the past and how can we improve what we're doing when 
moving into the future while sticking with our core values intact?  It's 
something we don't do enough of, especially given that we have something 
that works pretty well today.  But pretty well won't cut it given that 
Apple has raised the level of the experience that we need to meet, and 
sometimes that means doing something different.  Inertia tends to be my 
greatest enemy these days, and I find that surprising.

But I digress.

> It was the only way to do what we did, so we didn't have much choice
> in the matter. Implementation details aren't all that important, but
> basically it had a sort of meta-spec file and worked its way down from
> there roughly as you describe. I'd imagine opensuse's build farm does
> something similar, though AFAIK the two tools do not share any code or
> even common developers.
> 
> It was of course wildly popular, because it solved exactly the problem
> we're discussing here, which is a very real problem for users.

Right.  But doesn't that seem to you like it's wedging into a system 
that's fundamentally broken for your use case?  Think about the amount 
of work you're going through to wedge yourself into a set of tools that 
don't even create great experiences for users in the first place.  It's 
a tough question: do you try to be compatible with everyone and create 
something that's pretty bad to get buy in or do you step out in front of 
the train and do something completely new where you have to sell 
everyone on the goodness of the new model?  That's why I'm going out 
there to prove instead of just talking it up all the time.  Always 
better to show than to talk.

--Chris